Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

LUCIUS JUNIUS MODERATUS COLUMELLA, of Gades, writer on agriculture, contemporary of Seneca the philosopher, flourished about the middle of the 1st century A.D. His extant works treat, with great fulness and in a diffuse but not inelegant style which well represents the silver age, of the cultivation of all kinds of corn and garden vegetables, trees, flowers, the vine, the olive and other fruits, and of the rearing of cattle, birds, fishes and bees. They consist of the twelve books of the De re rustica (the tenth, which treats of gardening, being in dactylic hexameters in imitation of Virgil), and of a book De arboribus, the second book of an earlier and less elaborate work on the same subject.

The best complete edition is by J. G. Schneider (1794). Of a new edition by K. J. Lundstrom, the tenth book appeared in 1902 and De arboribus in 1897. There are English translations by R. Bradley (1725), and anonymous (1745); and treatises, De Columellae vita et scriptis, by V. Barberet (1887), and G. R. Becher (1897), a compact dissertation with notes and references to authorities.